With all the attention recycling has received, you might have thought a bill providing for sensible solid waste management would have made it through to the finish line.
Guess again. The bill – H.B. 2181 and its companion in the Senate, 2674 – would have given the Department of Health overall authority to design statewide standards that the counties would be expected to meet in developing their waste management plans. It was introduced in the Senate by Donna Ikeda and in the House by Virginia Isbell. Assigned in the House to Mark Andrews’ committee, it died without a hearing. In the Senate, the bill (modeled after California’s solid-waste law) passed out with its major provisions intact – and ended up in the House in Andrews’ committee.
By the time it came up for a hearing there, county governments had come out against it. In a caucus, however, representatives from the four counties agreed to support the fundamental points of S.B. 2674. It seemed likely that the bill would emerge from Andrews’ committee bearing a passing resemblance to the Senate passed version.
But then, according to several accounts, a Maui County planner paid a solo visit on Andrews – and all bets on S.B. 2674 were off. The bill that finally came out of Andrews’ committee was a different creature altogether from that which went in. From 122 pages, it was reduced to 20, and that included eight pages of a bill of Andrews’ to outlaw the landfilling of household hazardous wastes. That measure would have turned retail outlets into collection centers for pesticides, paints and the like – although it did not give consumers any incentive to return the unused portions of hazardous products to the point of sale instead of simply throwing them out with the trash to be landfilled. When S.B. 2674 resurfaced before Ikeda, the sides were so far apart that the bill had no chance at all.
The DOH is continuing to try to develop a statewide approach to solid waste. And counties may themselves encourage recycling, waste minimization and the like. But the achievement of a statutory framework making sensible waste management the law of the land has been put off for at least another year.
Volume 1, Number 1 July 1990